http://legalperspectives.blogspot.com/search/label/Legal%20Education

http://legalperspectives.blogspot.com/search/label/Legal%20Education

Hmm. What percentage of law schools in the bottom three tiers would you consider producing members of an elite?

Of the top tier?

I think that responds directly to the core issues, not to mention, does anyone believe that a person who has graduated from law school and passed the bar is prepared to practice law, in any fashion, without supervision?

Let’s be honest; the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of law graduates will not be members of an “elite.” They will make up a level of hardworking “worker bees” who quite frankly will not have the luxury of sitting around an Oxbridge drawing room, sipping sherry, and debating finer points of jurisprudence, or spending their precious time in law school behaving as if they were.

And quite frankly, in previous years, the average law student who graduated in his or her mid-twenties with minimal or no debt could afford to devote their time to delving into these intellectual topics at the expense of not building practical skills, because they could spend a few years post graduation building up these skills for little pay. This is just not the case now for most students.

Do I think law school should be more than just a trade school? Certainly (and this is coming from a liberal arts grad who prized his training and learning)probing, intellectual inquiry of different points of the law is important..but not at the expense of developing practical skill sets that will enable students to actually get jobs and hit the ground running in this exceptionally difficult legal job market. The latter skills have to be made the priority in teaching.

I find Prof. Solove’s comments to be just a little too idealistic, given the realities of what most law graduates will be doing once they graduate (if they are lucky enough to get jobs in the legal field at all).

I’ve been a lawyer for over thirty years and on the faculty of Mass. School of Law for the last ten. And some years ago I co-authored with a couple of my colleagues an article in the Journal of Legal Education pointing out some of the ways we in fact meet the call of the Macrate Report and do so for far less money than most law schools. (We’ve gotten better since then.)

The choice between “a lawyer factory” and a place where the students “think about the broader issues in the legal system” is a false one. And ironically, our “lawyer factory” is a much better place to focus on “larger moral questions,” the “tension between the rule of law and justice,” and the “policy implications” of the law than were either of the “elite” law schools I attended. Doctrinal law is far better taught and learned when it is anchored in reality, the reality of law and law-related practice that my students are likely to engage in.

Much of what I studied in law school was absolutely meaningless to my life and work as a lawyer, and I would bet that a substantial portion of working lawyers would echo my sentiments. Law school did not prepare me for the bar exam, and after I passed it, I knew almost nothing about how to do any of the things I was then licensed to do — except for work I did in a very good small law office during my final semester of law school.

In your posting, you keep saying legal education “isn’t simply about producing . . . lawyers” or “simply train[ing] them . . . to be . . . hired guns” or “should be more than a lawyer factory.” The assumption throughout is that what you make sound like the easy part is in fact being done. It isn’t.

Just imagine a medical school that taught its students all about the history and philosophy of medicine, the societal impact of medical developments and technology, the economics of healing and dependency, but didn’t have the time, money, expertise, or inclination to teach them what doctors do. If that sounds ridiculous, it should.

What I think this whole debate in the blogosphere misses is that such an education can be provided only if law schools focus on teaching. To focus on teaching does not mean to hire practitioners with 20 years experience. It doesn’t mean that Ph.Ds are the answer either. It simply means that teaching, independent of scholarship and independent of practice experience, has value. Lots of it, and law schools ought to start taking that seriously.

http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2008/01/practicing_law.html

Just to be clear on how my post relates to Dan’s Claim 3, I don’t know about other commenters, but I certainly didn’t intend to claim “no value” to a practice-destined student in taking Jurisprudence or Legal History. My discussion is focused on the teaching of basic law classes, e.g. Torts, Contracts, etc. Even in those classes, I think there’s plenty of opportunity to talk about the issues that concern Dan, i.e., “the broader issues of the legal system, to understand its history, to think about whether certain laws are good or bad.” My sense is that practical training and dilettante-ish interests would be sufficient to enable a professor to lead a Contracts or Civ Pro class discussion of those issues, and standard case law readings followed by questions or notes in the text (or maybe short squibs from an article) would be sufficient on the student end as well. To the extent that students and professors want to supplement practice-oriented classes with more theoretical ones that go in-depth on scholarship, bully for them. I myself hope to teach a legal-history-type seminar in the next few years.

2. The rise in tuition is a function of many things, including the increasing provision of services to students, such as career services. One of the areas that is expensive but which has unquestionably improved the quality of practice for lawyers is the whole clinical area. Well developed legal writing programs have also improved the quality of student’s abilities immensely. Interdisciplinary focus has got to be a minimal factor in increased costs.

Though the ABA punted in its settlement with the DOJ, legal education today is far superior in terms of the preparation of students to practice than was the case 50 years ago. I think few would want to go back to the “good ole days.”

Amen. As a practitioner at a big law shop, I can attest that while my colleagues and I always strive to attain the utmost in competence and ethics (sounds cheesy, but it’s true), there is neither the time nor the incentive to think about the law from a historical or normative perspective. If this type of thought is not fostered in the law schools (through faculty research and classes), where would it be fostered?

I am not trying to equate the two. I have argued that the bar exam bears no relationship to practice and should be abolished.

I only comment to say that I hope these two things are recognized as being utterly different things, completely unrelated to each other.

Which is not to say that it can’t be a school’s mission to produce bar-passers. It’s simply to say that if it’s that school’s mission, then the mission to produce better lawyers will likely suffer.